East german vogel

2. Follow-on Reportage

According to Reuters , 10 Jan. 1996, a Berlin court found Vogel guilty of "perjury, four counts of blackmail and five counts of falsifying documents." The court gave Vogel "a two-year suspended sentence and a 92,000 mark ($63,500) fine." Vogel's lawyer said his client would appeal. Associated Press , 10 Aug. 1998, notes that a German federal court has lifted Vogel's extortion conviction. The court "ruled it was the former communist government -- not its negotiators -- who was accountable for extorting payment for permission to leave.... However, the court left untouched Vogel's conviction on perjury and forgery charges, along with the 14-month suspended sentence for perjury and $51,000 fine for forgery."

The draw for 1992 UEFA European Football Championship qualifying took place on 2 February 1990, with East Germany drawn in Group 5 along with Belgium, Wales, Luxembourg - and West Germany. By 23 August that year, the East German parliament confirmed reunification for 3 October. The planning for the opening fixture away to Belgium on 12 September was too far along to be cancelled, and so it was played as a friendly. [3] It was also planned to play East Germany's home fixture against West Germany, scheduled for 21 November 1990 in Leipzig , as a friendly to celebrate the unification of the DFB and DFV, but the game was cancelled due to rioting in East German stadia. [3]

Heinz Volpert played a decisive role in planning a fruitful export for the cash-strapped GDR. This was the expulsion of political prisoners to West Germany in exchange for cash. Rather than holding thousands of prisoners in overcrowded jails and getting unfavourable publicity for so doing, it was better to be rid of them and earn vital foreign currency in exchange. Vogel was seen as the appropriate man to carry out this mission, at first using the Evangelical Church as a go-between in 1962. From 1964 to 1989 he "sold" 33,755 prisoners to West Germany. Their value varied according to their profession, their "crime" and how well they were known in the West.

Vogel died on Thursday at his home in Schliersee, Bavaria, after recently suffering a heart attack.
His swaps included KGB agent Rudolf Abel for US pilot Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR, in 1962.
He also oversaw the transfer of nearly a quarter of a million people from East to West Germany for billions of marks.
After reunification in 1989, Vogel was accused of fleecing some of his former East German clients of their properties and swindling his Western negotiating partners, and was briefly imprisoned in the 1990s.
Spies, prisoners, emigres
Born in Lower Silesia on 30 October 1925, Vogel studied law in Jena and Leipzig after World War II and graduated as a lawyer.
The Powers-Abel swap made world headlines in 1962
Encouraged by East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, to make contacts among West German lawyers, he gradually became a broker for the spy swaps and prisoner exchanges which would make him famous in Germany.
The exchange of Powers for Abel, an English-born KGB man who had been caught spying in New York in 1957, was the first.
It was conducted, like some of the others which followed, on the Glienicker bridge between Potsdam in East Germany and West Berlin.
Guenter Guillaume, a Stasi agent unmasked among the closest aides of West German Chancellor Will Brandt, was exchanged in 1981 for captured Western agents.
In all, Vogel brokered the exchange of more than 150 spies and his swaps included the liberation of Soviet Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (now Natan Sharansky, an Israeli citizen) in 1986.
But he also helped to broker the transfer of more than 34,000 East German political prisoners and 215,000 ordinary citizens to the West, beginning in 1964.
West Germany paid nearly marks ($) for their liberation.
Lavish lifestyle
In its report on his death, the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle notes that "during the height of the Cold War in the late 50s, Vogel was the only point man" between West and East Germany because the two states denied having any official contacts at the time.
Vogel was one of the most mysterious figures of the Cold War, the BBC's Paul Legg writes.
He hardly seemed a typical communist apparatchik: with his English-style suits, gold Mercedes car and lakeside villa, Vogel was also handsomely rewarded by the West for his unique role in brokering the exchanges.

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East german vogel

Vogel died on Thursday at his home in Schliersee, Bavaria, after recently suffering a heart attack.
His swaps included KGB agent Rudolf Abel for US pilot Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR, in 1962.
He also oversaw the transfer of nearly a quarter of a million people from East to West Germany for billions of marks.
After reunification in 1989, Vogel was accused of fleecing some of his former East German clients of their properties and swindling his Western negotiating partners, and was briefly imprisoned in the 1990s.
Spies, prisoners, emigres
Born in Lower Silesia on 30 October 1925, Vogel studied law in Jena and Leipzig after World War II and graduated as a lawyer.
The Powers-Abel swap made world headlines in 1962
Encouraged by East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, to make contacts among West German lawyers, he gradually became a broker for the spy swaps and prisoner exchanges which would make him famous in Germany.
The exchange of Powers for Abel, an English-born KGB man who had been caught spying in New York in 1957, was the first.
It was conducted, like some of the others which followed, on the Glienicker bridge between Potsdam in East Germany and West Berlin.
Guenter Guillaume, a Stasi agent unmasked among the closest aides of West German Chancellor Will Brandt, was exchanged in 1981 for captured Western agents.
In all, Vogel brokered the exchange of more than 150 spies and his swaps included the liberation of Soviet Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (now Natan Sharansky, an Israeli citizen) in 1986.
But he also helped to broker the transfer of more than 34,000 East German political prisoners and 215,000 ordinary citizens to the West, beginning in 1964.
West Germany paid nearly marks ($) for their liberation.
Lavish lifestyle
In its report on his death, the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle notes that "during the height of the Cold War in the late 50s, Vogel was the only point man" between West and East Germany because the two states denied having any official contacts at the time.
Vogel was one of the most mysterious figures of the Cold War, the BBC's Paul Legg writes.
He hardly seemed a typical communist apparatchik: with his English-style suits, gold Mercedes car and lakeside villa, Vogel was also handsomely rewarded by the West for his unique role in brokering the exchanges.